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Is this what you tell them at the border when they ask if you bought anything? What do you mean "track you"? You're right there in front of them.
If it's being shipped, then the shipping company has an obligation to declare. You're not going to win that one.
There is one chance and that is to get the seller to lie on the declaration form and then ship via post. A lot of post is not searched. However, you'd be taking a chance that you may end up paying any way. The seller, of course, could get in real trouble and as a business are unlikely to play that game on your behalf.
Funny story about the border crossing. My neighbor is an old man (close to 80) and he drives across the border to buy a couple of cylinders of acetylene for his welding. At the border on the way back he is asked if he has bought anything while down there. His answer: "just gas". Whereupon they wave him through.
The hardware is owned by my LLC, so that would be still illegal. As would be transferring (fake sale) and buy it again in CA or get it free from there.
Private however, yes, sure this works fine - just like i and everyone else brings back lots of crap up to the EU limit from every travel.
As noted, private - sure. I'm a sizeable company, i can't do such things, same as i doubt @francisco and others would do this.
This also, just like the "not checked drive import" prevents me from exporting the hardware to EU/US again (not entirely, but it gets complicated with ownership and who imported it to CA - as you DO need to declare this at the border, even if duty/tax free then).
It all depends how much hardware your moving over the border really. If it looks like a legit amount, they'll just tell you to go.
So the only way to avoid being taxed for the servers is moving it to the Netherlands (or buying it there) and than shipping it to Canada?
Well, any EU country should be fine, but NL is the nearest with a territory in the region (they have some islands near Venezuela), followed by French ones in South America.
Saint Pierre and Miquelon is a French territory minutes from Newfoundland. Not sure how tax would work there.
Not a bad idea, but not EU:
A territory is not EU member and not in customs area - only an integral part is.
The former Netherlands antilles were not really EU (some islands are now not either) but are now, from what i remember (the split was some years ago):
But anyway, these are islands which means the shipping alone forth and back even to a free port as Curacao's or directly to Willemstad would cost more than CA import tax and even shipping (around 15% tax).
@william I thought that might be the case. I'm driving an empty car from NL to Vancouver in a couple months so I was going to offer my delivery services.
That's 7,000 kilometers. Or did you mean the other NL? lol
It's "Harbour Centre" but there's some other options, just none of them are very good.
Aside from Peer1 in Harbour Centre, there's:
Esecure has a DC in Coquitlam - https://esecuredata.com/datacentre
Cologix, has Harbour Centre + another location. - http://www.cologix.com/data-centers/vancouver/
There's also these guys in Kitsilano - https://www.kitsilanohosting.com/ -
http://www.datacentermap.com/canada/vancouver/backbone-datavault.html
Most of them back-haul to Harbour Centre though, there's at least one DC in Surrey but I can't find the name of it now, they offered point to point wireless links.
For those looking for a VPS, there's - http://vanvps.com/ - they're not cheap but were the best provide I could find at the time and they've been around for awhile.
I lived in Surrey for 3 years, it's a great place to live but everything, including DC space, is very expensive. For me it was better to use Ramnode Seattle as someone else said above, the routing to the US is just much better.
On Telus it was 12ms to my Ramnode SEA box & 30ms~ to downtown Vancouver. Canadian routing kinda sucks and most traffic goes through the states anyhow.
And as far as border crossing going, it really depends on which passport you hold. For a private amount of gear, it's very unlikely that the border guards would charge you any tax/duty, they generally only care about booze & cigs.
If they ask me what I buy, I tell them what I buy. Always declare what you get, and let them decide if you need to pay or not, which is why I said someone who lived in the states for more than 48 hours can bring back goods that worth $800 without needing to pay taxes and duties.
We're talking about driving the damn server cross the boarder, there's no shipping company. Yes, I'm with the server, they can't say that server must be for commercial purposes, they have no proof. Unless if they find a way to locate that server after it's being colo'd and DPI network traffic, they can't prove anything.
Well the closest place to exchange connections is at SIX. Telus routing seems to be a bit better compared to Shaw but since there's nowhere to interconnect within the city for the other companies, it just all goes to SIX, besides, there's hardy any data centers near the area. Well if it was going from Shaw to Telus or the other way around, however, it doesn't do that, they could buy transit from them, but it's expensive so they just rely on SIX for peering...
However, I don't understand why the ping is so high anyway, it doesn't seem to be going to SIX, but I'm not 100% sure..
https://www.peeringdb.com/ix/195
https://www.peeringdb.com/ix/863
Yes I know there's a smaller exchange in Vancouver, however all the connections just end up at SIX....